I may be mistaken but I thought Safari's "activity" view showed downloads made by Flash applets. So you just get the URLs for every image served up right on a silver platter. I'd assume it works the same in Chrome.

You can just as easily deter casual image saving by doing what some folks do and put a clear image layer above the actual image, so the browser prompts the user to save a 1px clear png instead. If they know enough to view the source or use a DOM inspector you can't really stop them anyway.

There are 3 main methods used to stonewall the saving of images from online content.

1. embed in flash/pdf

2. javascript to interrupt right clicking

3. overlaying a transparent image to capture the click

I say 'stonewall' because as a general rule: If the user can see/hear it then the user can save it. Most often in the pristine format supplied.

Content providers should be aware of this already and simply not make commercially-useful content available online. (E.g. by using low resolution/overly compressed or watermarked images.)

Where degraded quality is acceptable: Consider that even the least technical person you know is able to pickup a camera and point it at their screen.

4. Chunk the image into tiles so even if you get the pristine source, you need to reassemble it.

You can still do screenshots, but it makes it much harder to suck down an entire gallery.

SWF as a DRM measure doesn't work terribly well -- it is easy to carve the data out of the SWF file. The JFIF headers (and equivalent for PNG and GIF) stick out like a sore thumb to forensic file carvers.

Even encoding or encrypting the data to be decoded by the flash player doesn't achieve strong protection -- the same carvers can be applied to process memory with similar ease. If you are going to display content on in an untrusted (end-user) process, content producers are going to have to accept that they can save that content.

Print Screen -> Open MS Paint -> Paste

Anyone can do that.

It's hard to automate though, so it doesn't scale particularly well if you want to suck down a whole portfolio or such.

Yes, I can see why some people use Flash as a sort of poor man's DRM.

That was my reaction as well; the author obviously doesn't realize Flash helps photographers protect their work from Google and the right-clickers, which a lot of them actually do care about.

I was half-expecting a complaint about View Source, which would've made sense; I don't see what the gripe is here other than a word of warning to fellow photogs about Flash probably not working on the mobile phones of those who might hire them, and a general appeal to the use of Web standards. Unless I'm missing something.

As an aside, though, when I read this, I cringed:

"I know [Flash disappearing] is fairly unlikely, but even Adobe has pretty much dropped support for Flash in favor of HTML5."

Er, come again? Adobe is sunsetting Flash for mobile browsers. All other incarnations of Flash are still very much on the roadmap.

It just kills me to see how confused so many people seem to be about Flash, what it's good for, what it's not so good for, and what Adobe's future plans are for it. Certainly Adobe is to blame for a lot of this, but the "Flash vs. HTML5" theme of 2011 certainly didn't help clarify how different the two really are.

Not necessarily—at least for some Flash interfaces, you can still get images loaded by Flash out of your browser's cache, as, e.g., with Opera's opera:cache cache explorer.

I guess you're right, though, in that by removing the plain old right-click+save option it adds at least somewhat of a barrier for the unmotivated or uneducated would-be thief.

It isn't very good at disabling a screenshot, though. Disabling right-click, in Flash or Javascript, even if the URLs aren't visible (which they are), is trivially circumvented with a screenshot.

You can disable that with Javascript too. It is about as secure.

FWIW, the same info can be captured using Fiddler.